Welcome to the Social Smarty Scoop, your weekly update for everything you need to know in the world of social media marketing for the week ending the 20th of October 2024. I have put together all of the updates from the past week that you need to know, so let's dive on in.
First up this week, want to boost your Instagram posts and get more reach? Of course you do. We have been told by Instagram that we just need to add music. This is really awesome news for those of us wanting to get our social media posts seen by more people in that it is super easy to do. All we need to do is when we upload a photo or a carousel post is attach music. Now, this is really simple. There is a music option in the same screen where you write your caption. We just pop some music on there. Then what happens is posts can be pushed out into the reels tab. This is an opportunity to reach more users who don't already follow you. So increasing brand awareness. Such a simple little tip from the guys at Instagram. So next time you're publishing a post, make sure to add music.
Now, when Instagram shared this update with us, they also included another little reminder, and that's around carousel posts. Carousel posts have multiple ranking opportunities. What does that mean? Well, when our carousel post is pushed out to someone's feed, if they don't swipe through all of the images the first time, then what happens is it can get pushed out again into their feed, but using the second image. For an extra boost with our Instagram content, not only do you want to add music, but you want to make sure that you're focusing on carousel posts or, as we know, reels. So if the bulk of your content is carousel posts and reels, you're going to be putting your absolute best foot forward to reach as many people as possible on the platform.
Next up this week, Instagram shareable digital business card is here. Now, this is pretty cool. It looks literally like a little business card, but it is digital. Obviously not. We can't print it out, but it features your username, your bio, your links, and you can even add music to it. So access it by going into Share Profile in your settings, and it's just a really easy way to connect with others without needing that traditional business card and having them type in your Instagram username.
Now, Facebook is now letting you share page reels and videos directly to your stories, making it even easier to cross-promote your content and maximise engagement. Now, I'm a big fan of sharing your content to your stories. We know that some people just hang out on the stories. They are really tempting. They're right there at the top of our feed, and they are in a relevancy order. We know that the first stories that we see at the top of our feed there are going to be from the people that we engage with the most, typically. It's really easy for us to get sucked into that conveyor belt of content where we jump into our stories. If you're only posting to the feed, you want to make sure that you're also sharing the stories so you don't miss out on those people who are stuck in stories.
Now, next up, you can now name your saved draughts on Instagram. Now, if you're like me, you might have a tonne of draughts saved, and adding names to them just really helps with being organised. The other cool thing is that you can now schedule them directly from the draughts folder. If you want to streamline your workflow, you can create a whole bunch of reels and save them as draughts and then head into your draughts folder and just start scheduling them from there.
Now, Meta is testing out a new feature called a social library. Now, this is quite cool. It's being tested on Instagram, and it will really make it easy for you to access all of your reshared, liked, or bookmarked posts. So think of it literally like a library of social media content that you might want to refer back to. Because at the moment, You can save posts, and yes, they go into your saved area, or you might share them with friends, and then you can go back to your messages and have a look for them, or you can like posts, and you can check your activity and see what is liked. But you're looking in lots of different places for this content. Having a social library makes so much sense. It's all the content that's important to you all in one place.
Next up, you can now see the number of likes and comments from Instagram when you share posts over to Facebook. So this gives you a really clear view on the performance of your post across those platforms. Instagram is testing a feature that I think is really, really needed. Now, we know that recently, Instagram It gave us the ability to go back into our reels and update the cover photo, which is super, super helpful, and I have used this a couple of times myself. But what you can't do currently is you can't then adjust the grid crop. You know how we have the full screen image for our cover for reels, but then we take a square out of that for the grid. At the moment, once it's published, once it's posted, then that grid view is stuck with whatever you selected at the time. This would allow us to go back in and not only adjust the reels cover, but also adjust that profile grid crop. I think this one is really useful, and hopefully it rolls out to everyone soon.
Instagram now allows users to save songs from reels directly to Spotify. This is super fun. You can create a playlist for your brand using all of the songs that you've used on your content over on Instagram on your reels and create a funky playlist that you can share with people. I think that's a really cool fun little update.
Linkedin is testing a new news banner at the top of the mobile feed. Now, this is going to highlight the latest developing stories and This gives us another reason to log into LinkedIn more often. Check out what's happening in the world.
Also in LinkedIn news, LinkedIn's new videos for you feed looks so similar to Facebook's recommended reels feed. So If you're a Facebook user, you'll know when you're scrolling through your feed on your mobile, you'll come to a point where there's a whole lot of reels that are recommended for you. It's like the feed turns from a vertical feed into a horizontal one and you swipe across the reels. Now, this is exactly what the videos for you feed on LinkedIn looks like. Now, I've only seen it second-hand. I haven't actually seen it in my own LinkedIn account yet, so I'm really excited for this to roll out, but it is really just a copycat of the way that Facebook recommends reels to us.
And lastly, this week, YouTube has clarified that all videos up to three minutes long will now be classified as Shorts. Now, this is only for videos uploaded after the 15th of October. But you may want to rethink your strategy with your videos because shorts are obviously quite different to our long form horizontal videos. So if we're creating horizontal videos which are under three minutes, then they will be classified as shorts. We've got two different options. We can obviously create those shorter videos with shorts in mind, or we can make our horizontal videos over the three-minute mark.
There we have it. That is your social media marketing news. The week ending the 20th of October, 2024. As always, if you want to continue the conversation, you'll find me all over social media at socialsmarty. Co. Until next week, stay social.
